Media

Newspapers
When compared to most European countries, the amount of readers of
newspapers in Italy is rathet low. Daily press's share of the advertising market
is only a third, which is the result of its long-term weakness. There are about
150 paid-for daily newspapers, both local and regional.
Television and Radio
Italian television is dominating the advertising markets. It is filled with
commercials, quiz shows and chat shows. Most channels are state owned.
Most advertising is concentrated to the TV markets.
Italians can choose from eight national TV channels: Rai Uno, Rai Due, Rai Tre
(which are owned by the public broadcasting company RAI), Rete 4, Canele 5,
Italia 1 (which belong to the private network of Mediaset, which is owned by
Silvio Berlusconi), La 7 and MTV Italia. In addition to these there are also
approximately 800 local TV channels.
Mediaset's channels are more about entertainment and advertising. They
have gained their popularity by importing TV series and films from the US,
cartoons from Japan and telenovelas from the South America and Mexico. For
the RAI it has been hard to build its own brand image and differentiate itself
from Mediaset, which is its main competitior. RAI finds it difficult to
characterize itself as a public broadcasting company, since it offers genre
compositions fairly similar to the ones of Mediaset, with large numbers of
reality shows, quiz shows, foreign and Italian TV series and movies.

The Italian radio reaches a wide set of the population: in 2008 the amount
was 73 per cent of population aged over 11 years. There are two public
stations in the lead: two divisions of RAI, Radio Uno, which concentrates on
news, public affairs and culture, and Radio Due, which concentrates on news,
culture, music and entertainment. The RAI also owns a third station: Radio
Tre, which is more of talk show station providing also classical music and
information about theatre, movies, books and so on.
A big share of radio audience belongs to private networks, such as RTL, RDSRadio Dimensione Suono and Radio Deejay. All these are music stations and
gather followers amongst the young public.

Internet
Italy has been quite slow to embrace Internet compared to other European
countries, and broadband penetration is still low. As of 2009, 61.3% of the
population (about 30 million) aged between 11 and 74 said they had Internet
connection at any place, by any means, and 47.9% of households (about 10
million people) said they had an Internet connection at home. There are big
regional differences, as the parts of Northern Italy have a bigger Internet
usage than the Southern parts.
Many Italian newspapers started web versions in the 90's and today all
newspapers have digital versions, although improvements could be made
there to attract the young internet consumers.

Major Industries
Italian industries are world widely known for high levels of quality and
craftsmanship. There are both large well-developed corporations and small
family-owned businesses, though the number of the latter ones is
conciderably larger and build the backbone of Italian industry.
By far the service sector is the biggest employer, employing 67,8% of the
population (2011) and having the GDP of 73,9%. Following that comes the
industry sector, employing 28,3% and having the GDP of 23,9%, and
agriculture sector employing 3,9% and with the GDP of 2,2%.
Services
For Italy, tourism is one of the most important industries employing many
people and bringing large amounts of foreign exchange into the country
(estimated revenue of 136.1 billion), and the tourism sector is growing every
year. In the year 2014 Italy had close to 50 million international arrivals.
Tourists are attracted by Italy's exquisite art, cuisine, history, fashion and
culture, not to forgets its beautiful coastline, mountains and ancient
monuments.

Industries
The economy of Italy has been diversifying slowly: changing from producing
foods and textiles more into producing steel, chemical products and
engineering. The main manufactured products include machinery; iron, steel,
and other metal products; chemicals; motor vehicles; clothing and footwear;

and ceramics. Many of the important industries are state-owned, but the
trend has been growing into privatization of industries.
Italian manufacturing is centered mostly in the north, more particularly in the
"golden triangle" of Milan-Turin-Genoa, where is an intence production of
machinery, automobile, aerospace and naval products. In the previously rural
areas of Northeast and Center Italy there are small enterprices of low
technology, but high craftsmanship, specializing in clothing, leather,
footwear, furniture, textiles, machine tools, spare parts, appliances and
jewellery. In the less developed Southern Italy, these two forms coexist
together.

Agriculture
Italy is one of the world's lead producers of wines (most famous the Tuscan
Chiantia and the Piedmonte Barolo), olive oil, fruits (such as apples, olives,
grapes, oranges, lemons, pears, apricots, hazelnuts, peaches, cherries,
plums, strawberries and kiwis) and vegetables (especially artichokes and
tomatoes), and in addition produces also beef, dairy products and fish. As in
2010, there were 1.6 million farms covering 12.7 million hectares (of which
63% are located in the Southern Italy), the majority of them being small
family-run businesses averaging only 8 hectares in size.

Technology and Science

Research and Development
The whole mentality of Italian mindset and education is rather non-scientific.
In 2011 Italy was investing in Research and Development only by 1.25% of
the GDP, which is significantly less than many other European countries who
decided to support research. When it comes to the public investment of
socio-health and biomedical research, Italy is well under both the EU average
and the OCSE average.

Figure 1 Gross domestic expenditure on R&D, 2001 and 2011

Even despite the lack of investment in research, Italy still manages to make a
number of scientific publications yearly on an international level. However,
from these publications only 13% makes it to be top-cited, when the
percentage 18 other countries reach is between 13%-20%. So the quantity of
researches done is fine, but the quality chould be improved. Also the Italian
research system is not good at collaborating amongst different institutes both
inside the country and internationally. OCSE considers internationalization to
be a big boost on a country's innovation level, and this in mind, Italy suffers
from a certain closure in its economy.

Figure 2 The quantity and quality of scientific production 2003-11

Workers' technological and scientific education

It's very important for every country that its workers have know-how on their
field. OCSE developed an indicator to measure the knowledge-based capital
of workers in relation to their education and tasks in the different positions in
a company. Among the measured OCSE countries, 13% is the lowest, scored
by Turkey, and the highest is is United States with the score of 28%, as seen
in the figure below. Italy ranks very low in this measurement.

Figure 3 Knowledge-based capital related workers, 2012

Sources
http://www.scienceonthenet.eu/content/article/francesco-aiello-michele-

bellone-luca-carra-sergio-cima/science-and-innovation-italy
http://ejc.net/media_landscapes/italy
http://www.economywatch.com/world_economy/italy/industry-sectorindustries.html
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/ECAEXT/0,,contentM
DK:21808326~menuPK:258604~pagePK:2865106~piPK:2865128~theSitePK:
258599,00.html
http://www.italia.it